Yeah, I Don't Know

Rating: Null/10 (14 November 2003)

Spoilers Man was this a disappointment. I remember when this movie came to theaters I was interested in seeing it, but it was taken out very quickly. So I waited for it to come to DVD, then had to wait for my stuff to arrive from a move so I could watch it in full widescreen glory. After months of hearing people say how great it was, I can't help but feel cheated.
It is strange that nowadays I hear people say "That movie was awesome!", then I'll watch it and disagree, and nine times out of ten their response is "Yeah, well, my expectations were so low ...". So if you lower your expectations enough, modern movies are palatable. How lame.

I think this movie is only "awesome" to someone who has had their standards for zombie movies lowered by such crap as "Resident Evil". As it is, the top zombie movie of all time is still "Dawn of the Dead". Everything since then, including the sequel "Day of the Dead", has been a shoddy rip-off. Some people will split hairs and say "these aren't zombies!" but they really are. They're just zombies that move fast, which was a good idea. In theory it would ratchet up the action. Funny that there is still so little of it in the movie.
The movie starts out okay, if a little predictably. Some guy wakes up in a hospital to find that the world has been taken over by flesh-eating "infected" people. Within the first few minutes the movie makes its first mistake: the man immediately falls in with other survivors, not spending any serious time on his own coping with the problem. His rather fey appearance and wimpish reaction to the situation makes him hard to accept as an action hero later in the movie.
Things quickly start to become a by-the-numbers affair. He meets a coed survivor group, with bulky masculine guy and suspiciously sexy, hardened, "I don't need anybody" female. Since the second guy is a problem he is immediately dispatched in a pretty cool scene (but it makes one wonder how the guy survived for so long, if he's so careless). Then the hero and heroine are free to ... ahem ... explore each other.
Here another mistake is made, as they again manage to find two other survivors immediately - a man and his daughter - and team up with them. I am a big fan of Brendan Gleeson and it's fun watching him work. But again the story begins to suffer from this development. Everyone suddenly decides to go try to find an Army station nearby that they pick up on the radio. On the way the crew stumble across a supermarket, with unlocked doors, whose wares are suspiciously clean and well-organized (you mean to tell me during the panic, chaos, riots, and confusion nobody thought to ransack the store?). They foolishly venture into a dark underground passage where they are bum-rushed by a bunch of infected guys, and manage to escape in a highly implausible manner (Gleeson would have to be pretty strong to lift a car with two people in it, and laden with groceries).
When they reach the Army station, everything falls apart. Gleeson dies in a ridiculous manner. The remaining guy and girls are taken to the army base, where the guy is told that the women will be raped and there is nothing he can do about it. He is taken out to be executed and escapes, then spontaneously turns into Rambo, surviving in the wilderness with no weapons or vehicle, then returning to off an entire squad of elite military personnel. Then he is gutshot, but due to the miracles of a quick fade and snappy editing, he is much better "28 days later ..." and is able to partake in a cheesy happy ending.
So many mistakes are made in this film. Why is our hero not given a chance to develop on his own before meeting others? Why are the others he meets so darn stupid? The film is strangely patterned after perhaps the worst zombie movie of all time, "Day of the Dead", in that it sets aside a perfectly good horror basis - zombies - and instead decides to go the well-trodden route of "man is the ultimate evil". The introduction of the squad of soldiers is the death's knell of the movie. From that point it's as if all logic and reason are discarded and a straightforward action movie ending is all the writer and director can imagine, complete with thudding techno music and neck-snapping rapid editing.
The ending is such an insult. We see our supposed hero gutshot, at close range, by a very powerful handgun. But he supposedly recovers without any experienced medical attention. It is true that alternate endings are included, in both of which the main character dies or is dead. But these are no consolation. The alternate ending thing is a cop-out. The movie should be the artist's statement, not a choose your own adventure book. They are telling the story, so they should decide what they want the story to be. Since they went with the idiotic happy ending, I can only assume that this is the story they decided was the best, which just puts the final crap touch on a crap movie.
While writing this review I happened to look up "Dawn of the Dead" and noticed that there is a remake in the works. So now the best zombie movie will be ruined too. But I'm sure everyone's expectations will be so low that they won't even notice it.